UNIT 5 A.L. GORDON AND A.B. PATERSON Structure Objectives Introduction A.L. Gordon : His Life and Works Characteristic Features of Gordon's Poetry 'The Sick Stockrider' : Text 5.4.1 Discussion A.B. Paterson : His Life and Works Characteristic Features of Paterson's Poetry 'The Man from Snowy River' : Text 5.7.1 Discussion Let Us Sum Up Questions 5.0 OBJECTIVES With the publication of the poetry of A. L. Gordon and A. B. Paterson in Australia, the pace of progress in the growth of Australian poetry was hastened. While Wentworth, Harpur and Ken&ll laid the foundation of Australian poetry, Gordon and Paterson built the base of the structure of Australian poetry. For first Gordon and then Paterson made poetry entirely out of Australian lifestyle that had evolved in - Australia; diggers, bushrangers and other personae and properties of outback life of Australia found a permanent place in Australian poetry through the pens of Gordon and Paterson. In this unit, you will study two paems each of Gordon and Paterson. A.L. Gordon was born in Scotland, and had his education in England but after he migrated to Australia in 1853, Gordon engaged himself in the adventures of life in Australia - horse riding, steeple chasing, politics and publishing and created lively ballads out of them. It is Gordon who first made the horse an Australian poetic image and metaphor standing for energy and speed of people in Australia. The sheepstations, bushmates, the open fields and blue sky of Australia found a mirror in Gordon's poetry which replaced the eighteenth century poetic diction and Romantic - Victorian wistful poeticisms with vigorous Australian colloquy. Hence Gordon deserves the lionization which, however, was accorded to him only afier his suicide. The last volume of Gordon's poetry, published a day before his suicide, is entitled Bush Ballads and Galloping Rhymes (1870). In a way, Gordon is a progenitor of the literary ballad in Australia. With the publication of the Bulletin from 1880 onwards, a wave of nationalism developed in Australian literature. You should remember that at the historical and political levels too, Australia was on the move towards nationalism and attained freedom from colonialism in 1901. A.B. Paterson (1864 - 1941) is the chief balladist of Australia. His early ballads kept on appearing in the Bulletin from 1886 onwards. The first ballad from Paterson 'published in the Bulletin was 'A Dream of the Melbourne Cup : a long way after Gordon'.*Patersonsigned the ballad with a pseudonym, 'The Banjo', the name of a racehorse of Paterson's fancy. The verses which he published regularly in the Bulletin A.L. Gordon and from 1886 onwards were collected in 1895 in a book entitled The Man from Snowy A.B. Paterson River und Other Verses. Its success was outstanding : no later collection ofbush ballads can compare with it. The first edition sold out in a fortnight, ten thousand copies were sold in the first year. The succeeding volumes of Paterson's poetry were published in the first half of the twentieth century. Hence they fall outside the purview of this Block. In this unit, we will discuss the life and works of Gordon and Paterson, the characteristic features of their poetry, and make extensive commentary on the most well-known and representative poem by Gordon andd then by Paterson, which will illustrate the two poets' identity as writers of ballads that embody the national character of Australians of that period. 5.2 A. L. GORDON :HIS LIFE AND WORKS Adam Lindsay Gordon (1833 - 70) was born at Fayal in the Azores in Scotland. He had his education in England. In 1953, he was banished by his parents to South Australia. In a poem entitled 'To a Sister', which he wrote three days before he sailed for Australia, he confessed: My parents bid me cross the flood, My kindred frowned at me; They say I have belied my blood, And stained my pedigree. Rut I must turn fiom those who chide, And laugh at those who frown; I cannot quench my stubborn pride, Not keep my spirits down. (Wilkes : 58) In South Australia, he enlisted in the mounted police. After two years he resigned from the constabulary service, and drifted about South Australia dealing in horses and riding in steeplechases. He received a legacy fiom his parents' estate, and then purchased several properties, married and lived in Dingley Dell, a small stone cottage still lovingly preserved near the seaside settlement of Port MacDonnell. From those years come many stories of Gordon's daring feats of horsemanship. Gordon had a brief and unspectacular parliamentary career in 1864-66, an abortive grazing venture in the Western Australia in 1866-67, and then conducted a livery stable in Ballaratt in 1867-68. After a severe head injury in a riding accident, followed by bankruptcy which was caused by a fire in the livery stable, and the death of his infant daughter, Gordon left Ballarat for Melbourne. In Melbourne, Gordon led an unhappy and aimless life, worked intermittently at his writing, and suffered from depression, insomnia and gain from niunerous riding injuries. When he failed to obtain heirship to the ancestral Gordon Lmd in Scotland, he faced financial disaster. On 24th June, 1870 , the day following the publication of his last book of poems, Bush Ballads and Galloping Rhymes, he committed suicide on Brighton Beach in Melbourne. In 1864 Gordon published The Feud, a ballad inspired by Noel Paton's engravings of scenes from the ballad, ' The Dourie Dens 0' Yarrow ' . ~inete'en't"iiCentury His second publication is Ashtaroth (1 867). It is a long dramatic poem indebted to the $ustralim Poetry Faust theme, but it has not produced any critical response. Gordon's poetic reputahon depends on his third and fourth publications, entitled Sen Spray and Smoke Drift (1 867) and Bush Ballads and Galloping Rhymes (1 870). In The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature, a concise estimate of Gordon's reputation is made: In 1934 a bust of Gordon was unveiled in the Poets' Comer of Westminster Abbey, making him the only Australian poet to have been thus honoured. That mark of recognition reflects the adulation for him after his death and through the first decades of the twentieth century. His popularity sprang partly from the romantic aura of his life, his aristocratic background, his exile in the colony, his reckless riding exploits, and the pathos of his death. It sprang, too, from the gratitude of Australian nationalists for Gordon's acclaim in his poetry of the outback way of life. His verses were loved and recited around camp fires and in the homesteads and shearing sheds of the back blocks. (302) In a nutshell, as Bruce Bennett says: Gordon's reputation continues to fluctuate but he remains today an even more popular poet than Kendall and also a focus of critical attention, although his status, as an 'authentic recorder of Australian bush life was eventually usurped by Lawson and Paterson. (60) 5.3 CHARACTERISTIC FEATURES OF GORDON'S POETRY Judith Wright has drawn a comparison between Kendall and Gordon, pointing out what Gordon contributed to Australian poetry: But he did Australian writing a service at a crucial time, by indicating a new direction of interest. Kendall had been attempting to write much the same kind of verse as might have been written bq' an English contemporary poet; in spite of a certain success with character pieces such as 'Jim the Splitter' he ' had not taken much interest in local event and character, and he knew, and ?re knew little of the active life of the country as it then was. It was to this life 0.' the 'back-blockers', the nomad workers, drovers and overianders, that Gordon's rhymes drew attention. (1964 : 68) Australian poetry was being nourished mostly on romantic wistfulness and landscape painting through the poetry of Wentworth, Harpur and Kendall. Gordon brought into Australian poetry the real lifestyle of the Australians in the outback, and to portray the picture accurately, Gordon introduced the colloquial style that could reflect the life as it was lived in the bush. Wright further observes: Gordon became an idol because of his adopting of Australian balladry and because he was himself a legendary horseman and man of action. The two currents of feeling (which, however contradictory, could exist almost side by side in certain people) once they were united, added force to the impulse towards a new kind of popular poetry. This allowed the accrptance of the more articlllate of the 'bush-balladists', and injected a new vigour into - Australian poetry, which had hitherto imitated the subjects and style of late- Victorian English verse. Gordon's popularity, then, represented a turning in the growth of A.L. Gordon and Australian poetry far more decisive than his actual work (which, properly A.B. Paterson examined, is of very minor value) seems to justify. It is rather as a national figure than as a poet that he is important; but his work gave a remarkable impetus and a new self-confidence to the popular poets, who now saw their hard inarticulate independerlce (1964 : 69). Brian Elliott assesses Gordon's poetic talent from another point of view: Gordon made two striking but indispensable discoveries: first, he discovered the colonial audience itself, the heart of Colonial moral and aesthetic awareness, and words (however rough) through which to reach it; and second, the warmth and vitality of the Australian light, especially the archetypal of the summer sky and the long horizon: 'the sky-line's blue furnished resistance.. .' Nothing in all Colonial poetry matches in importance Gordon's signal achievement, the fixation of the Australian image.